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It looks like I took a bullet for the team. That quarter-page ad for a college that guaranteed an MA degree in two years was a cunning Gazeta Wyborcza hoax. They say the interest generated by the ad was enormous, with people from all corners of Poland. I’m not exactly sure what GW thinks this proves. That employers have an obsession with certificates and papers (supposedly a thing of the communist past)? But everyone knew about that. It seems strange that GW, such an outward looking, western-orientated newspaper, needed to enlist the help of half of Poland to find out about the existence of qualification inflation, which has been known about for years in the West. If they can’t read English in there, well any young Pole looking for work could have told them about it. In fact, Gazeta Wyborcza itself carried a story about how Poznań was looking for a public toilet manager with a university education and several years’ experience.

Saturday’s paper prints reader reactions to the big campaign and it is fair to say that this battle the newspaper decisively lost. One student, for example, wonders why she is supposed to feel ashamed or inferior for writing her MA thesis (on Warsaw) in Polish. Enough. No doubt the war on free education will be won with or without the GW’s fifth column.

Gazeta Wyborcza sent in the foreign legion today in a lack lustre affair which could hardly be described as a decisive victory. They found a handful of obliging foreign students to complain about Poland. One said that the backup facilities in Poland were much worse than in Portugal, “doubtless because Poland values education very lowly and funds it accordingly.” No, of course that wasn’t printed. She said “doubtless because in Portugal public universities are fee-paying – 900 euros a year.” The newspaper also committed a tactical blunder by admitting in an accompanying interview that some third level colleges (for example, the one from which the interviewer, Piotr Pacewicz, graduated 30 years or so ago) are alright, having introduced paid night courses a few years ago. (I need hardly point out that Pacewicz got his degree for free. I would add that he got it free from the communists - except that it is now a crime in Poland to praise communism.)

Gazeta Wyborcza launched its latest offensive – and it is often quite offensive – on Polish lecturers on Monday, Oct 19^th in the year of Our Lord 2009 with a big splash on the results of a survey which showed, among other things, that university lecturers think university lecturers are capable and clever and – more surprisingly – their students also think them capable and clever. So, everything okay then? Everyone happy? No! Gazeta Wyborcza is certainly not, interpreting the results as evidence of complacency (and entitling their campaign “The Higher School of Shame”) because Polish lecturers, their universities and their courses are in fact rubbish. Fact always trumps opinion. Facing the page bearing the report (headlined “We, wonderful lecturers in our super colleges” – oh, the irony) are two interviews, one with the minister for science and higher education (former rector of a private university), and one with the rector of Collegium Civitas (a private university). The businessman uses the opportunity to sing the praises of private universities and fee-paying students.

(Gazeta Wyborcza also saw fit to print a comment from its internet forum from one kociewak2, a law student here in Gdańsk, who claims that in England professors are available 24 hours a day. A few of my friends are professors in England but when I rang them this morning at 3 am they were unavailable for a comment.)

Monday’s paper contains a quarter page ad for a private college which offers – nay, guarantees – an MA degree (“magister”) in two years if you have finished school. Presumably – though it’s not mentioned – you also need a BA degree since it takes five (5) years to earn (not buy, with a money-back guarantee) an MA in Poland. There is also an ad for a competition organized by something called the Future Academy. That might be a third level institution, who knows? There are no ads in the paper from taxpayer-funded universities.

The campaign against free education continues in Tuesday’s paper, which reports that the Conference of Rectors of Higher Academic Schools demanded of the minister the right of public universities to charge fees if private universities are to be funded by the state.

Klaus Bachmann, a Political Science professor, writes in the same paper an article about the need to reform higher education. He has some good points to make and seems a very little less enthusiastic about denying university education to the poor but – this is Poland after all… One of the present system’s weaknesses is that lecturers in the humanities are cut off from the outside world: they read only Polish books and lecture only in Polish. Perhaps they should lecture in Swahili? No, of course not. They should lecture in English to Polish students about Polish literature (this already happens: there a bonus is paid for lecturing in English). I can see, of course, how widening one’s reading to non-Polish books would increase a Polish prof’s knowledge but how would lecturing in English – with all the attendant misunderstandings, hesitations and repetitions – help?

Doctorates and post-doctorates (“habilitacje”) should of course, Bachmann continues, be written in English so that foreigners can review them since Poles can’t be trusted. Research should be published in other countries, in other languages (sometimes Bachamnn remembers the existence of languages other than English, sometimes not, as when he suggests linking pay to the number of one’s English-language publications). I can imagine the editors of Western academic periodicals eagerly awaiting a deluge of submissions on the demographic history of Pcim, based on Parish records, 1718–1767. Harvard is just dying to sink its teeth into minor Polish writers whose works cannot even be bought in Poland.

One of his ideas – as usual, something that’s been knocking around the west for years – is “putting elite [Polish intellectuals’ second favourite word, after “prestigious”] research centres beyond the reach of universities” because they (universities) are “incapable of guaranteeing high quality.” This is already happening in Germany, where such “elite research centres” are funded by private foundations. I can suggest a snappier name for “elite research centres”: why not call them “universities”? Since they are funded by private foundations: “Private Universities.”

For such a gung-ho westerner, Bachmann seems to have ignored a fundamental piece of advice given to American university students: do not use false dichotomies in your essays. Here he goes:

• Are universities to be skansens ruled by old profs, or competitive institutes where no one has job security? (Believe it or not, he is clearly in favour of chronic insecurity in his profession.)
• Are universities to be financed from teaching (govt. subsidy plus fees) or from research results?
• Is the model Polish academic a textbook writer or a project manager?

Wednesday’s pitched battle against lecturers is a little less ideological. Plagiarism is condemned and the merits of professional, non-academic education are talked up. But – this is Poland after all… The minister has ordered a higher education strategy to 2020 – not from her civil servants, good God, they wouldn’t have a clue – but from a consortium comprised of famed educationalists Ernst & Young and world-renowned teachers, The Market Economics Research Institute. “The experts … admit that fees cannot be avoided. Students are opposed to fees.” So are lecturers, as GW’s own opinion poll shows. Being a journalist must be so exciting – always finding out new and surprising things, like Ernst & Young are against free education, while students are for it. The pope wears a funny hat and bears don’t use public toilets…

If there’s one thing you Polish profs have to get through your goddamned heads it’s Speak English or Die.

If there’s one thing you Polish students have to get through your goddamned heads it’s Pay Up or Shut Up.

• Methods infringed civil liberties, say police

• Only hardcore agitators were targeted, people insist

Citizen tactics of containing thousands of police for several hours at the protests in front of Scotland Yard and using batons against police protesters were condemned yesterday as an infringement of the right of police to demonstrate.

In the aftermath of the protests in London, politicians, demonstrators and a serving police officer raised concerns about the methods used by the members of the public to control crowds of more than 50. Eyewitnesses said dozens of environmentally friendly police constables camping out along Bishopsgate in a peaceful protest during the day were cleared from the area aggressively by hooligans with batons and dogs after nightfall on Wednesday.

The thugs had earlier said they would ask the protesting police officers, whom they acknowledged were peaceful, to move as night fell. Mr Simon O’Brien said his mates would be “politely and proportionately” asking campers to move on. But one eyewitness, Martin Horwood, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham, said dogs were used on protesters near the camp. James Lloyd, a legal adviser in the camp, said rioters forcefully cleared the area using batons around midnight.

“There was no announcement, the rioters just started moving forward very quickly from the south,” he said. “They were pushing everyone back, pushing forward quickly. They caused panic, policemen were screaming and shouting … There was a constable in a wheelchair struggling to move, being pushed forcibly by them. It was totally disproportionate.”

Another eyewitness, Ashley Parsons, said: “The violence perpetrated against so many policemen around me over that hour was sickening and terrifying. Without warning, from around midnight, heavily armed members of the public repeatedly and violently surged forwards, occasionally rampaging through the protest line and deliberately destroying coppers’ property, some thugs openly screaming in pumped-up rage.”

Outside Scotland Yard, scores were held for up to eight hours behind a cordon manned by ordinary citizens, in a practice known as “kettling”. Police with children and police on the beat were told by members of the public on the cordon that “no one could leave”. According to witnesses, when the policemen were finally allowed to go on Wednesday night, they were ordered to provide the names and addresses of their stations and have their pictures taken. If they refused, they were sent back behind the cordon.

John O’Connor, a neighbourhood watch organiser, criticised the tactic. “They are using this more and more,” he said. “Instead of sending snatch squads in to remove those in the crowd who are committing criminal offences, they contain everyone for hours. It is a retrograde step … it is an infringement of civil liberties.” The tactic was challenged in the courts by two officers who were held for seven hours at Oxford Circus, central London, during the May Day protests in 2001. They claimed their imprisonment breached their rights to liberty but a House of Lords judgment ruled the tactics legal.

The mob leaders defended their actions, saying they were dealing with a small minority of cops bent on violence, while allowing the demonstrations to go ahead. They said the investigations were continuing. Two police stations in east London were raided yesterday after the public viewed video footage taken by special teams. By last night the number arrested rose to 122 over three days. Four people were handed over to a lynch mob charged with damage to a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland on Wednesday. Mindaugas Lenartavicius, 21, was charged with arson recklessly endangering life, Daniel Champion and Ben Shiells, both 18, with burglary, criminal damage and theft of a computer, and a 17-year-old girl with burglary with intent to cause damage.

O’Brien said the cordons were put in place because a group of about 200 people were violent. “There was no real deliberate attempt to say you are all going to stay here for hours,” he said. He said police officers had been allowed to leave throughout the day, and that by about 7.30pm those left were police who wanted to be there, and they were asked for their names as they left as part of the inquiry. “What I saw there at that time was a couple of hundred police officers who did not want to go. They had … been the agitators throughout the day,” he said.

We saw and spoke to many police who were clearly not agitators, but who were refused permission to leave. David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, said: “How did the public end up in a situation where they used the same degree of force on the most peaceful demonstration as they did for a violent protest at Scotland Yard? They seem to only have one trick.”

Enough of scandals, I say. Let’s take a “time-out” to have a look at the “beautiful game.” From my seat last night in the pub I could just see – over the tops of the heads of the drunks and wasters at the bar – the TV screen, which was showing the Poland Slovakia match. This was another glorious day for Polish soccer and although the canny Slovaks won 1 “nil” by tricking “our lads” into scoring an “own goal” you can only admire the plucky Poles. They played in the snow in a nearly empty stadium (one Slovak player ran back in to get his camera and take a snap). The fans boycotted the match as a mark of their disgust at the Polish football union. In the few bleary-eyed minutes of the match that I saw, the State Television cameraman skillfully kept the angle low so there was no sign of the empty terraces. The roar of the crowd seemed strangely undiminished, even though there were only about 4,000 people. Some of the lessons learned in a propaganda state or not easily unlearned. The snow, the football union says, kept them away.

In “Żebry Adama,” (Adam’s Begging) the first story in Wojciech Kuczok’s Widmokrąg (widmo – ghost; krąg – circle; widnokrąg – horizon), a naked beggar catches hold of the narrator and forces him to divest himself of first his (Armani) suit jacket, and then his trousers. It’s not meant, of course, to be an entirely realistic account of an everyday occurrence: it goes all metaphorical, phantasmagorical and poetico-rhetorical about a third of the way through with divagations on whether it is possible to understand freedom without having been set free and ruminations about the narrator’s relationship with his father. Also, Kuczok stops using full stops and paragraphing. Nevertheless, I say, let the pettifogging begin:

The naked man never says anything. He just indicates with his eyes that having got the narrator’s (Armani) jacket, he now wants the trousers. So the narrator takes off his trousers – without taking off his shoes! “Had it a trousers on it?” Flann O’Brien once asked. Yes, but no shoes. Or maybe Armani is known for making very broad trousers? Why even mention “Armani?” After the next war, plague, famine, flood or whatever cataclysm will next engulf Poland, people will still be reading books, maybe even this one (it’s not that bad – not my cup of tea but not bad on the whole). But will they still be wearing Armani? Will they understand that the narrator must be well-to-do if he has a suit called an “Armani”? Okay, Kuczok gives other clues that the narrator is well-off but why drag a story down with brand names in this way?

During the narrator’s fierce internal struggle with his father and his suppressed homosexuality and whatever you’re having yourself he recalls the time when he was caught in a tram without a ticket. He recalls the stage whispers of his fellow passengers, who accuse him of arrogance – a rich man like him should fly to work in his own aeroplane, not use trams, and certainly not sponge on the state by not buying a ticket. But the narrator tells us that he had tried to buy a ticket. The tramdriver had none so he went around these same passengers asking if anybody could sell him a ticket. Why, then, would they react with such hostility to his “arrogance”? Kuczok can be defended here: the narrator did not really hear their comments. He is only projecting. One could safely assume that the narrator has some kind of persecution complex (to simplify) or feels guilty about his wealth – were it not for Kuczok’s bare-foot blunder. As it is, the reader is unsure. Perhaps the passengers really did react so vehemently. Maybe Poles really are that petty and vicious… Or maybe Kuczok was careless.

Widmokrąg is a collection of five stories, each punctuated with an “interludium”, named after a work by Chopin (opus 28, nrs. 3, 15, 4 and 18 if you are interested). This immediately brought to my mind a book by Michał Komar called Wtajemniczenia (Initiations), reviewed in this week’s Polityka. The heroine, Ms. E., holds a salon where people gather to talk about this and that – Dürrenmatt, Sophocles, the traffic these days. The reviewer, Katarzyna Janowska, writes (with no apparent irony) “Order is bestowed […] by the rhythm of meals because in the salon not just ideas but also refined dishes are delectable. Omelette with oysters suits conversations about the essence of justice; plum tart goes with discourse on the philosophy of Shestov.” Ms. E. has a servant who describes Hegel’s prose thusly: “It reminds one of carefully prepared osso buco or carelessly grated crème brûlée.” I’ll be reviewing this fascinating book just as soon as I have completed my double first in Philosophy and Classics. In the meantime it’s beer, sandwiches and James Ellroy.

The same issue of Polityka also has an article about France. You don’t need to read it to see that it is identical to the previous ten thousand articles on France that have appeared outside of France. The title is “Cooling Volcano?” and the subhead reads in part “[How will Sarkozy] manage to change French society.” For my entire adult life I have been reading about how France is a failure and needs to reform. And yet it’s still there, still one of the richest countries in the world. I think I’ll spare myself the effort of reading another attack on the principle of the welfare state. That’s all these articles ever amount to.

I still don’t think it’s a scandal but since it has driven everything (even Roman Polański) off the TV screens, here’s some more about the Zbig Chlebowski affair (see here), going mainly on Robert Walenciak’s article in the current Przegląd. The businessmen in question are Ryszard Sobiesiak of Casino Polonia and Golden Play and Jan Kosek of Casino Centrum ATT. The politicians in question are, at last count, Chlebowski, Drzewiecki, Schetyna, Szejnfeld, Czuma and Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The bill in question is one that would affect the gambling industry and has been working its way through the parliamentary system for months. One section of it proposes a “charge” on low-stake gambling machines (one-armed bandits) which is really just a tax. The PiS-friendly (more later) Central Anti-Corruption (CBA) Bureau tapped Sobiesiak’s phone and last week released transcripts to the PiS-friendly newspaper Rzeczpospolita in which Chlebowski was heard bragging that he had successfully blocked the taxation provision of the bill for a year but that it was hard work and it would be great if “Miro” and “Gześ” would help out. As I mentioned before, “Miro” and “Gześ” are thought to be references to the minister for sport and the deputy prime minister but Chlebowski knows many people of those names and cannot now remember which he meant – an excuse surely even a nine-year old would be ashamed to advance. So a businessman wanted a tax lifted from his business and the pro-business ruling party agrees to it. The sheep bleated for a low-tax party and a low-tax party is what they bah-bah bloody well got.

The scandal is really in the CBA’s actions. They leaked “operational materials” in an ongoing investigation to a newspaper. Why? Had they decided that Sobiesiak and Chlebowski were not under suspicion and that no crime had been committed? Tusk comes into the picture in August, which is when CBA chief Mariusz Kamiński (appointed by current opposition party PiS some years ago) told him what was going on. Some time later Sobiesiak stopped using phones and now people are speculating that Tusk warned him off or that maybe the CBA warned him off in order to make it look as if Tusk had warned him off. Such are the people Poles choose to have run their country for them. Look at the timing: this bombshell is dropped, scuttling, one presumes, any chance of bringing criminal charges against Chlebowski, which after all is the CBA’s job, just as Kamiński goes on trial for, among other things, faking documents in an investigation designed to entrap politicians. Also, presidential elections are just over a year away and it looks like Tusk (PO) will compete with Kaczyński (PiS).

Opinion polls indicate that people want the heads of Chlebowski (head of the PO “klub”*), Drzewiecki (minister for sport), Schetyna (deputy PM), Szejnfeld (a deputy minister in finances) and Czuma (minister for justice), but in all fairness I think that people, quite sensibly, support the resignation of any and all politicians as a matter of principle. If the pollsters had asked them should Barack Obama resign many would have said yes.

* No Pole I have ever encountered has been able to tell me what is meant by “klub” in this context.

Interviewed in Polityka (Oct 3^rd), Jacek Strzemieczny of the Civic Education Centre in Warsaw speaks in favour of sending your children to public, socially mixed schools. They prepare you better for life than “prestigious” schools where middle class children interact only with other middle class children. Asked how primary school principals detect the “good” pupils (or rather, winnow out the “bad” ones), he says it’s enough to call a meeting of future pupils’ parents and see if they even bother to come, or ask the children if they have had any contact with English.

I’ve commented before on the slavish devotion to the all-conquering English language of Poles – or rather, of some Poles. Some quarters are considerably more skeptical than the – ahem – elite (not that I count Strzemieczny among the slavish). It’s possible even to get the impression that, say, a Michał Witkowski could actually – unthinkably – be mocking devotees of English when he spells out English words phonetically in Margot. “Heloł” and “in czardż,” the loathsome media people say, while Waldemar Mandarynka’s trademark drink is Bacardi “brizzer” and in one place he refers to “Dragi, baraki, ful plazma na bekstejdżu!” It’s all much less reverent than what we meet a few lines down the page. Wrocław (repeatedly referred to by the show biz phoneys in the toe-curling diminutive “Wrocek”) is called “The Meeting Place”; its most prestigious (inevitably) property development is “Sky Tower.” These pretentiously idiotic names are not given phonetically: they’re the genuine products of complex-ridden PR gurus in Polish marketing departments.

Marta Dzido, in her Małż (Bivalve (zool.), mussel, clam; or, more likely given the book’s subject matter, short for “małżonek” (spouse)), also betrays less than 110% devotion to the Master Language, frequently defiling it with merely Polish spelling: “de namber ju ar trajink tu ricz…”, “Sajko bicz”, “Majteczki mejd in czajna”. Somehow much more effective than irony quotes, the phonetic spellings suggest a certain disillusionment with the promise of success held out by English boosters. Dzido is hardly a new Sinclair Lewis or John Steinbeck but there is something refreshing about the bucket of cold water she dumps on careerism in thrusting modern Poland. Her narrator is lucky enough to be asked by a newspaper to send 30 (!) ideas for articles to the editor. After a week she tries to get in touch with him:

Unfortunately he’s very busy, he has a very important meeting. He has an important board meeting. He’s in a meeting.* He just went out a minute ago. He’s on the phone. The boss can’t talk right now. He’s got a very important visitor. The boss is on a business trip. Unfortunately he can’t take your call. He’s in a meeting. He’s giving an interview. He’s riding his secretary behind closed doors in his office. He’s taking a dump on your thirty ideas.

There’s no need to know English. Just know someone.

* Polish seems to have more words for meeting than English does that I can think of off hand.

“Just have any old handsome face, cut in any old tattoos, pierce yourself more than the others, shave designs into your stubble, tilt your hat, carry a puppy in your arms, say controversial nonsense, swear, be more vulgar than the rest – and you’re a star.”

Those are Michał Witkowski’s instructions in his latest book, Margot. A part of it is the life story of Waldemar Bacardi Mandarynka (so-called because of the solarium-induced colour of his skin), a “martyr of early Polish show business.” Here’s Waldi on the subject of the jurors at his casting, as they say in “Polish” (they mean “audition”):

They nod to themselves, he [Waldi] is stupid, it’s good that he talks rubbish, that he flaunts his stupidity and annoys all the dying intelligentsia. They’re schizophrenic – they’re kind of former intelligentsia themselves: music critics and university graduates now transformed into media people. So they hate with all the more passion those of the intelligentsia that didn’t give in.

In a peculiar replay of communist Poland’s favouring of the children of workers and peasants, the intelligentsia jurors light on Waldi’s simple, rural background. One of them has read in Gazeta Wyborcza about “przystankersi”, disaffected country youth who hang around bus shelters, roughly corresponding to the urban phenomenon of “blokersi” (“przystanek”: bus stop; “blok”: block of flats). Waldi – although he is wearing artificial finger tips (“tipsy”) and has obviously turned his back on the countryside – plays up his humble origins and his membership of this semi-mythical group of “przystankers” (I suspected Witkowski of making it up but it turns out that some social anthropologist / Sunday supplement journo really did identify and describe such a subculture) and before you know it is eating sushi in Warsaw with the best of them.

I saved the best for first because in fact Margot is a disappointment. It tells a few stories, rather chaotically, and does not really draw them together well. To start with it’s a story of the life of truckers and the prostitutes that service them (quite explicit, it’s not an ideal Christmas present for your 7-year old nieces). Half way through, in a switch of subject “coś a là w podobie” Głowacki’s Ostatni cieć (The Last Caretaker), the narrator (Margot) introduces the life story of Waldemar Mandarynka: “While the enema dripped in me (because it’s not like a pear, it’s more like a drip)* Waldi honoured us with this story.” Waldi’s story is a straight satire of the shallow, celebrity-obsessed, dishonest, cruel, Warsaw-centric etc. etc. meeja. In it we meet many too-familiar types, such as the “Aging Gracefully – Yes, Gracefully – Star”, who could be any one of dozens of grotesquely primped, botoxed and face-lifted Polish female tv personalities whose age is impossible to gauge with more accuracy than “between 30 and 70.” It’s funny, rising to a farcical high-comedy kitsch explosion at the end but, lacking any real depth, easy (easy for Witkowski, that is). After Waldi’s story (about a third of the novel’s length) the narrative thread returns to Margot, but with only seven pages left there seems little point to telling us that she wandered off for casual sex in the moonlight.

Then again, I didn’t enjoy Ostatni cieć from the normally reliable Głowacki either so maybe this kind of structure just isn’t my thing. I look forward to Witkowski’s next book and in the meantime draw your attention to Bill Martin’s English translation of Lubiewo – Lovetown. You can read an extract on-line here.

* Literal translation. I haven’t the stomach to do the research required to bring it up to scratch.

The hawky eye of Your Man in Gdansk restlessly probes the murky undergrowth of Polish Politics to bring you the latest in scandals:

A juror in some dancing show, is up on charges of bribe taking in connection with the upcoming privatisation of a publishing house.

The Central Anti-Corruption Bureau tried unsuccessfully to entrap former president Kwaśniewski and his wife.

The head of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, Mariusz Kamiński, is in trouble over allegations of politically motivated entrapment (see above - although this has been known for years).

PO (the ruling party) politician Zbigniew Chlebowski is in trouble over his efforts to remove from a bill a paragraph that would damage the interests of the gambling industry. He was recorded saying words to the effect that “Miro” and “Grześ” were on-side. Sadly, memory has failed the sweating Chlebowski and he does not know who he could have meant by “Miro” and “Grześ,” though there are some suspicious souls who think “Miro” might be Mirosław Drzewiecki, minister for sport, who came on-side around June this year, and “Grześ” might be Grzegorz Schetyna, deputy minister for internal affairs and administration. Some even think the minister for sport should resign!

Oops! The last “scandal” slipped in there by accident. The wheeling and dealing between the gambling industry and the politicians was business as usual. There is no hint of corruption. PO, an openly - indeed proudly - pro-business political party, was simply persuaded by a branch of business to adopt a certain policy. That that policy will/would deprive the exchequer of something like 400 million zloties a year is irrelevant. Until a personal payment to one the three politicians is traced, there’s nothing to shout about. (The gambling industry companies in question already, of course, made perfectly legal donations to PO as a whole.)